Is ukulele a small guitar?

zztush

zztush

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No. We are native!

Renaissance guitar is our common ancestor. Renaissance guitar has four courses. We keep GCEA, which is one of the best tuning for string instruments, over 400 years. John King has taken this tuning advantage on ukulele and revived a playing technique from the Baroque era.

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We are main building and guitar has annex. Our tuning has come earlier than guitar tuning. C, G and F keys are all easy to play on ukulele. Guitar's tuning is shifted to sharp. Even F key, which has F and Bb chords, is difficult to play on guitar. Wound string has allowed guitar to add 6th string. Low G does not mean surrender. Thank you very much Hawaiian people to introduce us such nice music instrument.
 
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I have always treated the uke like a small guitar in so much as I play everything on it. Rock, country, blues, jazz, classical...........all of these sound good played on a ukulele. Thank you Hawaiian people indeed :shaka:
 
Hi, Dave! I remember that you and Jollyboy admit your ukuleles small guitars. No need to surrender. Guitar is only one of the variants of ukulele.
 
DownUpDave said:
I have always treated the uke like a small guitar in so much as I play everything on it. Rock, country, blues, jazz, classical...........all of these sound good played on a ukulele. Thank you Hawaiian people indeed :shaka:
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Coming from a guitar background I definitely tend to treat the 4-string uke as a small tenor guitar, the 8-string uke as a nylon-stringed octave mandolin and the banjo-ukes as small tenor banjos. The oddball in the stable is the 6-string uke which produces a sound closer to a parlor guitar than I expected.

Tuning is interesting snd personal. I gave up on GCEA a long time ago, opting for fifths (mainly CGDA) which I find more comfortable.
 
DownUpDave said:
I have always treated the uke like a small guitar in so much as I play everything on it. Rock, country, blues, jazz, classical...........all of these sound good played on a ukulele. Thank you Hawaiian people indeed :shaka:
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It's the Portuguese who brought the uke to Hawaii.
 
I think that some people try to turn their ukuleles into small guitars.
 
I'm ok with 'small guitar' but when I see or hear 'toy guitar', then I consider this hostile and completely incorrect, and manifest of willful ignorance.

Having said that, I have a handful of ukes in perfect-fifths tunings now, so maybe a few are now more similar to mando-family than the guitar.
 
Actually there is a renaissance guitar in a museum in Rome that is about the size of a Uke and a very attractive instrument it is too. It just has the strings doubled. Tuning of course would have been the same as the uke. Ultimately these things are all related, just variations on a common theme, which is why you can play uke music on a renaissance guitar and renaissance music on a uke.
Many people think that the tiny guitar known as the Guitalele is somehow a new invention. It isn't. There's a Panormo guitar that was made sometime around the mid 1800's that really is nothing more than a tiny guitar, a baby guitar. The first example of X - bracing (as in a steel string guitar) that I've come across is the bracing in a Cittern, which puts it at around 1780' ish. Way, way before Martin.
Shameless plug of a renaissance guitar that I made a few years ago. It's about the size of a baritone uke.

 
I tune my tenors dGBE and keep my baritone re-entrant too. So they don't sound like guitars.
 
SoloRule said:
It's the Portuguese who brought the uke to Hawaii.
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Ok smart ass (relax folks we are good friends) you are correct

China introduced pasta to Italy..........but nobody thinks of China when they think of spagetti. Just like no one thinks of Portugal when they think of ukuleles So I thank the Hawaiian people for the ukulele just as zztush did.

With the beautiful complex pieces you play for Campbell I know you treat your ukes as small 4 string classical guitars.
 
DownUpDave said:
Ok smart ass (relax folks we are good friends) you are correct

China introduced pasta to Italy..........but nobody thinks of China when they think of spagetti. Just like no one thinks of Portugal when they think of ukuleles So I thank the Hawaiian people for the ukulele just as zztush did.

With the beautiful complex pieces you play for Campbell I know you treat your ukes as small 4 string classical guitars.
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Small guitar gives you better respect. As downupdave told me once - call it FOUR STRINGS guitar that will stop people from asking stupid question like where is your grass skirt !
Ukulele really deserve a lot more respect ! People tend to judge it by the size. No one believe me when I said how much a uke can cost.
So my vote is [ FOUR STRINGS GUITAR] . As for the tuning - CAMSUKE (Campbell) said - just tune it to whatever the instrument is happy - that is of course if you are playing solo.

From your smart ass ! :eek:
 
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DownUpDave said:
...
China introduced pasta to Italy..........but nobody thinks of China when they think of spagetti.
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LOL

How about some Vermicelli Lo-mein? Moo-Goo Angel-Hair Gai-Pan?

With some Chicken Egg-Foo-Yung Parmesan? Vanilla Egg-roll Cannoli?
 
DownUpDave said:
:smileybounce:

Booli.....you're making me hungry
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yes me too - off topic but...

there use to be a restaurant near me that was setup inside kinda like the food court at the shopping mall, left side was a pizza joint and all manner of italian fare, and right side was Asian chinese/korean/thai/sushi/tempora fare...

it worked out great when a previous ex-girlfriend ALWAYS wanted Thai food (which wrecks my digestive system for days) or some exotic sushi, and I was happy with a slice of pizza or a chicken parm dinner, so we would go there a lot, and could each order our prefs, yet still sit and eat together...

eventually they closed down and got replaced by an 'Atlanta Bread Factory' which is fine, but I thought it was cool to be able to get such a wide variety of foods, all at the same restaurant like this...and have not seen one since....

...now I return you to the regularly scheduled discussion - please carry on....:)
 
Rllink said:
I think that some people try to turn their ukuleles into small guitars.
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I still feel that re-entrant tuning (rather than the tuning itself: there are many tunings for six-string guitars) is a core aspect of what makes a ukulele a ukulele, and I would also limit this to the smaller sizes only, because that is how the instrument was designed and configured at the time when it acquired the name "ukulele". It was a hybrid of the small, four-stringed machete (linear) and the five-stringed, larger rajão (or another Portuguese instrument), which had a re-entrance tuning. I think the Taropatch Fiddle (five stringed uke) was initially also more popular on Hawaii, and it was mostly on the mainland where the four-string ukulele took off.

But it's really all just labels. I love the sound of (some) linear tenors, and they are fantastic instruments, regardless of whether they are "really" ukuleles or small tenor guitars. It has its own, distinctive sound (which to me is really nothing like a classical guitar's sound texture).

They are all stringed instrument and probably all go back to the same Arab stringed instrument that the guitar was derived from.
 
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